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NuWho Rewatch: Blink
NLSS Child decided, eventually, that she couldn't wait until I had a weekend free to watch Blink. We sat down right after school today (to allow plenty of recovery time) and armed ourselves with popcorn and haribo ("for stabilisation" she explained). Of course, Blink isn't actually that scary - certainly not as scary as the imagination of a small child catching five minutes on YouTube had managed to make it. At the end NLSS Child agreed that it actually had been OK and that she is no longer afraid of falling statuary in the shower.
I think Blink is one of the best Doctor Who stories out there. Even though I am, to a certain extent, somewhat tired of Stephen Moffat's timey-wimey puzzle box story construction, I don't think he's ever done it so well as he did here and, in this outing at least, it is fresh and different. Carey Mulligan is excellent as Sally Sparrow, but this is very much Moffat writing under the editorial control of Davies. The interactions in Sally Sparrow's flat and, to an extent, those between Sally and Billy Shipton are much more every day than the interactions we tend to get in Moffat's vision of Doctor Who.
There has been some criticism recently that Moffat has a "type" of female character which makes them all a bit interchangeable. One thing that is fairly striking here is that it isn't just female characters he writes to a type. Larry Nightingale now looks like nothing quite so much as a prototype Rory Williams. In fact NLSS Child in discussing her vague memories of catching a fragment of Blink on youtube said she thought she had mistaken Larry for Rory.
Of course the risk with this kind of trick story construction is that it does not bear repeated viewing. Even more so here, where a number of moments rely on surprise as part of their charm - for instance the back and forth video conversations. This is my third viewing of the story and I still like it a lot, even though I know what is coming. That said I had a fair idea when I first saw it since I had read Moffat's "What I did in my Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow" in the 2006 Doctor Who annual. (Interestingly I recently got involved in an online conversation where one participant insisted there was an earlier version of the story, by a woman, that was a "beloved Children's story" dating from the 1970s or earlier. Sadly they had been told this by a friend and knew no more, beyond insisting that their friend definitely wasn't misremembering fan gossip about Moffat's story. It would be interesting, if this is true, to track down the original.) That said, the story in the annual, while starting in a very similar fashion, diverges pretty quickly. This is a grown up Sally Sparrow for a start, and the Weeping Angels are a new invention which, I think have rightly become recurring monsters though like all recurring monsters they suffer from the show's need to up the stakes with each appearance. In some ways one of the great things about Blink is that it isn't satisfied to have just one idea (the timey-wimey story telling) but to have two (the quantum locked Angels).
This is still a really good story, for all we've become much more familiar with Moffat's style of story construction and the types of characters he tends to write. It is clever enough and different enough to stand on its own as a genuinely excellent piece of Doctor Who.
I think Blink is one of the best Doctor Who stories out there. Even though I am, to a certain extent, somewhat tired of Stephen Moffat's timey-wimey puzzle box story construction, I don't think he's ever done it so well as he did here and, in this outing at least, it is fresh and different. Carey Mulligan is excellent as Sally Sparrow, but this is very much Moffat writing under the editorial control of Davies. The interactions in Sally Sparrow's flat and, to an extent, those between Sally and Billy Shipton are much more every day than the interactions we tend to get in Moffat's vision of Doctor Who.
There has been some criticism recently that Moffat has a "type" of female character which makes them all a bit interchangeable. One thing that is fairly striking here is that it isn't just female characters he writes to a type. Larry Nightingale now looks like nothing quite so much as a prototype Rory Williams. In fact NLSS Child in discussing her vague memories of catching a fragment of Blink on youtube said she thought she had mistaken Larry for Rory.
Of course the risk with this kind of trick story construction is that it does not bear repeated viewing. Even more so here, where a number of moments rely on surprise as part of their charm - for instance the back and forth video conversations. This is my third viewing of the story and I still like it a lot, even though I know what is coming. That said I had a fair idea when I first saw it since I had read Moffat's "What I did in my Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow" in the 2006 Doctor Who annual. (Interestingly I recently got involved in an online conversation where one participant insisted there was an earlier version of the story, by a woman, that was a "beloved Children's story" dating from the 1970s or earlier. Sadly they had been told this by a friend and knew no more, beyond insisting that their friend definitely wasn't misremembering fan gossip about Moffat's story. It would be interesting, if this is true, to track down the original.) That said, the story in the annual, while starting in a very similar fashion, diverges pretty quickly. This is a grown up Sally Sparrow for a start, and the Weeping Angels are a new invention which, I think have rightly become recurring monsters though like all recurring monsters they suffer from the show's need to up the stakes with each appearance. In some ways one of the great things about Blink is that it isn't satisfied to have just one idea (the timey-wimey story telling) but to have two (the quantum locked Angels).
This is still a really good story, for all we've become much more familiar with Moffat's style of story construction and the types of characters he tends to write. It is clever enough and different enough to stand on its own as a genuinely excellent piece of Doctor Who.
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I do think, though, that one of the shining aspects of the episode is its camerawork and direction. The reason why the Angels are so gripping here is that they were shot in first-person, making the audience the ones who had to stare at them to keep them stationary. This was ignored in later Angel episodes, which is one of the (many) reasons they lost their punch. Of course, they can't do the same thing twice, which is why they started adding stupid powers to them to make them new. They should never have brought the Angels back. (Actually, I never liked the Angels. The first time I watched the episode, I had a very difficult time suspending my disbelief with them. It was only the termporal trickery that kept me in the story.)
I never noticed that Larry is very similar to Rory. That's very interesting.
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That said, I think changing the nature of the angels was a mistake when they were brought back. I think there were more interesting stories that could be told with them without trying to up the stakes. But I often think that about recurring monsters in Doctor Who.
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I think they were worth bringing back, but agree they botched it. But I'm only half convinced that a monster has to be scarier, more dangerous, more ambitious, more whatever on each appearance and I think Doctor Who frequently falls into that trap with all its monsters. You can tell a different story about a monster without having to play some kind of escalation game.
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Hettie MacDonald is returning to direct more Doctor Who later this year, for the first time since Blink - it will be of interest to see if her visual style remains as distinctive.
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